The European Union has mobilised a total of €96 million in 2020 for humanitarian, development cooperation as well as conflict prevention support for the Rohingyas.
The EU, along with the United States, the United Kingdom and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, co-hosted the conference in solidarity with Rohingya refugees and countries in the region recently.
Representing the EU at the conference, EU Commissioner for Crisis Management Janez Lenarčič said the international community came together to show its support and deliver further assistance to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees and the communities hosting them.
“We must do all we can so the Rohingya crisis does not become a forgotten tragedy. At this difficult time, the EU continues to stand by the most vulnerable with this emergency humanitarian support.”
Commissioner for International Partnerships, Jutta Urpilainen, said the ongoing coronavirus pandemic has increased the challenges on the ground. “EU pledge reinforces our engagement with partners in support of people and development in the region. We must prevent a worsening of this crisis.”
EU AID FOR ROHINGYA REFUGEES AND COUNTRIES
Today’s funding from the EU will focus on helping those most in need, channeled through UN agencies, NGOs and international organisations:
Humanitarian assistance of €51.5 million, including €20 million from the Emergency Aid Reserve, has been allocated to help refugees and vulnerable host communities. Priority sectors will be protection (including child protection andgender based violence), critical healthcare (including mental health) and nutrition, food assistance and key coordination roles.
Development support of €39 million has been allocated to strengthen the resilience and social cohesion of Rohingya refugees and host communities in Cox’s Bazar District and of internally displaced people in Rakhine State. Support will focus on strengthening basic social services, particularly education, health, food and nutrition security, as well as addressing protection and information needs.
Conflict prevention support of €5.5 million has been allocated to contribute to stability and peace in the region.
In nature, the believer recognizes the wonderful result of God’s creative activity, which we may use responsibly to satisfy our legitimate needs, material or otherwise, while respecting the intrinsic balance of creation. If this vision is lost, we end up either considering nature an untouchable taboo or, on the contrary, abusing it. Neither attitude is consonant with the Christian vision of nature as the fruit of God’s creation.
(Pope Benedict XVI – Caritas in Veritate, 48)
Under the direction of Paolo Ondarza #SeasonOfCreation Instagram: @vaticanmuseums @VaticanNews Facebook: @vaticannews
The European Union on Saturday welcomed the announcement of the agreement to normalize relations between Sudan and Israel.
“This is a positive development that should contribute to the stabilization and the prosperity of the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea regions,” its spokesperson said in a statement.
Besides BCL and JCD, members of Islami Shasantantra Andolan and Ahle Hadis demonstrated on the campus in Dhaka demanding the accused student’s expulsion on Saturday.
They took out a procession and organised a human-chain demonstration called by Jagannath University Islamic Society, which came into being during similar protests against alleged defamation of Islam on social media by another student in April last year.
Al Imran Babu, who is heading the Society, said even members of Islami Chhatra Shibir, Tabligh Jamaat and followers of Charmonoai Peer joined the demonstration along with general students.
Shahbaz Hossain, a BCL leader of the unit, said some activists of the organisation joined the demonstration because general students were enraged by the “Facebook post of the accused student”.
Another BCL leader, Syed Shakil, said they would announce fresh protests soon although there was no instruction on the issue from the central leadership.
Speaking to bdnews24.com, JCD leader Shahadat Hossain demanded legal action against the accused student and her expulsion.
bdnews24.com could not contact the student, who was a member of Bangladesh Council to Protect General Students’ Rights, a platform that spearheaded the anti-quota movement.
The organisation has suspended her and asked for her explanation within a week, said its leader Mahmudul Hasan Mishu.
Proctor Mostafa Kamal said they would discuss the issue at a meeting on Tuesday.
Pallabi Police Station OC Wazed Ali said the student filed a general diary alleging that her Facebook account had been hacked and the perpetrators had uploaded the post that stirred the protests.
“We will send the case to the cybercrime department on Sunday,” he said.
Postage stamps, letter boxes, old post offices… in fact, anything connected with the mail tells a story of its own. They tell you tales ranging from politics, history, technology, biography, genealogy, economics, geography, disaster and triumph.
Anil Dhir’s The Last Post is an ode to the romance of the post office tinged with nostalgia. He brings to us the human side of the thousands of people who have lived and worked within the system.
Our tradition of ‘mail-running’ dates back to the 15th century, when the Mughals ruled most of India. Down the ages, the job of a mail-runner was a risky one, and the ‘hirkara’, as he was called, had to protect life and limb with a staff, spear and bell.
At the hour of cow-dust, these khaki-clad runners assisted by torchbearers went through valleys, hills and forests accompanied by dug-dugiwallahs to chase away wild animals. So infested was the countryside with predators that the roads were almost impassable. ‘Day after day, for nearly a fortnight, some of the dak-people were carried off at one or the other passes.’
Today, in our cities perhaps, we take the postman for granted. It’s a courier’s world, zooming from house to house, on two-wheelers making deliveries. Elsewhere, without fuss, our man of letters continues to deliver mail to 90 percent of the countryside, just as he did a 100 years ago, when mail running was fraught with risks.
Record books have it that in the early days of our hill stations, mail totalled less than a 100 articles a week, which in June 1935 peaked to 1,31,562 articles: all managed by one post master and his two able assistants. An old colonel got a new orderly, whom he instructed to drop the mail ‘into the hole in the red box’ at the post office.
This the orderly did with regularity. Six weeks passed and urgent official letters remained unanswered, the colonel grew anxious. He dragged the servant by the ear (I believe you could do that in those days!) and that is how the twain arrived at the post office.
Adjoining the office was the post master’s drawing room—neat, clean, and with a fireplace three quarters draped in the summer months with a plush red curtain. Of course the letters had been posted, there they lay, behind the curtains—all 17 of them behind ‘the hole’.
I guess it’s about time for the post offices to reinvent themselves. Till they do so, they will hardly be capable of withstanding the new challenges thrown up by courier companies, mobiles, SMS and WhatsApp and email.
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<a href="/topic/meat" class="body-link" data-vars-item-name="BL-4572829-/topic/meat" data-vars-event-id="c23">Meat</a>-free and plant-based products can still be labelled “sausages” or “burgers”, the European Parliament has ruled.
So-called veggie burgers, soy steaks and vegan sausages can <a href="/go/london/restaurants/vegan-hot-dog-bleeding-burger-moving-mountains-a4136821.html" class="body-link" data-vars-item-name="BL-4572829-/go/london/restaurants/vegan-hot-dog-bleeding-burger-moving-mountains-a4136821.html" data-vars-event-id="c23" rel="nofollow">continue to be sold as such</a><a> </a> in restaurants and shops across the <a href="/topic/european-union" class="body-link" data-vars-item-name="BL-4572829-/topic/european-union" data-vars-event-id="c23">European Union</a>, despite lobbying from farmers.
Europe’s largest farmers’ association, Copa-Cogeca, had supported a ban, arguing that labelling vegetarian substitutes with designations that brought meat to mind was misleading for consumers.
But a group of 13 organisations – including <a href="/topic/greenpeace" class="body-link" data-vars-item-name="BL-4572829-/topic/greenpeace" data-vars-event-id="c23">Greenpeace</a> and <a href="/topic/wwf" class="body-link" data-vars-item-name="BL-4572829-/topic/wwf" data-vars-event-id="c23">WWF</a> – urged the politicians to reject the proposed amendments, arguing that a ban would have not only exposed the <a href="/topic/eu" class="body-link" data-vars-item-name="BL-4572829-/topic/eu" data-vars-event-id="c23">EU</a> “to ridicule”, but also damaged its environmental credibility.
They said promoting a shift towards a more plant-based diet is in line with the EU Commission’s ambition <a href="/news/world/hottest-year-on-record-2019-global-warming-report-a4420721.html" class="body-link" data-vars-item-name="BL-4572829-/news/world/hottest-year-on-record-2019-global-warming-report-a4420721.html" data-vars-event-id="c23" rel="nofollow">to tackle global warming</a><a> </a>.
Farmers have lobbied to protect meat products (Getty Images)
Not being able to use familiar terms like steak and sausages could make the product more obscure to customers, it was argued.
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</aside>After the vote, the Swedish EU lawmaker Jytte Guteland said: "I'm going to celebrate with a vegan burger."
The European Consumer Organisation, an umbrella group bringing together consumers’ associations, praised the MEPs for their “common sense”.
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“Consumers are in no way confused by a soy steak or chickpea-based sausage, so long as it is clearly labelled as vegetarian or vegan,” the group said in a statement.
“Terms such as ‘burger’ or ‘steak’ on plant-based items simply make it much easier for consumers to know how to integrate these products within a meal.”
Together with Greenpeace, the group regretted that politicians accepted further restrictions on the naming of alternative products containing no dairy.
Terms like “almond milk” and “soy yoghurt” are already banned in <a class="wpil_keyword_link " href="https://europeantimes.news/category/europe/" title="Europe" data-wpil-keyword-link="linked">Europe</a> after the bloc’s top court ruled in 2017 that purely plant-based products cannot be marketed using terms such as milk, butter or cheese, which are reserved for animal products.
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EU environment ministers on Friday adopted a biodiversity strategy aimed at protecting ecosystems, a move deemed essential to tackling climate change and reducing the risk of future pandemics.
Meeting in Luxembourg, the 27 national ministers backed the EU Commission’s strategy of placing at least 30 percent of the EU’s land maritime areas under special protection.
The European governments now expect the EU commission — the bloc’s executive arm — to integrate the biodiversity policy objectives in relevant future legislative proposals.
A Monday report by the European Environment Agency (EEA) warned that more than 80 percent of the European Union’s natural habitats were in poor or bad condition.
The European Parliament also easily passed a massive farm subsidy bill on Friday, to the fury of environmental activists who say it fell well short of EU commitments to fight climate change.
“It’s five minutes to midnight on the climate emergency clock, but our governments are stalling,” said Greenpeace EU climate policy adviser Sebastian Mang. “Meanwhile, the gas industry, the industrial farming lobby, airlines and carmakers are shooting holes in the EU Green Deal, and our chance of a safe climate for people and nature is fading.”
Urban farmer Rachel Rubenstein thinks the coronavirus pandemic, which has shut down major cities, state and international borders, is a chance to rethink where we get our food from.
Local car parks, median strips and rooftops, golf courses and even public parks — they’re just some of the ideas she and her city farming friends are throwing around as potential places to grow food.
“I think that having food grown close to home is super important, because we have seen a lack of access to fresh food with the bushfires and then COVID,” Ms Rubenstein said.
In Melbourne’s inner-northern suburb of East Brunswick, she’s growing fresh organic produce such as carrots, radishes, spinach, broccoli, and citrus for Ceres — a not-for-profit community-run environment park and farm.
An urban farm in East Brunswick in Melbourne is seeing a surge in demand for locally grown food by those stuck in lockdown.(ABC Regional)
Ceres has seen demand for its food boxes double since the pandemic began, as lockdowns forced people to shop more locally than ever before.
“Everything that I grow here on the farm is harvested straight away and goes straight to the grocery and the cafe on site,” Ms Rubenstein said.
“Just seeing how much I can grow in 250 square metres says something about how we can utilise space better in the city.”
Ceres grows vegetables across two sites in the inner city, but it’s not enough to fill demand with produce sourced from elsewhere to help fill the gap.
Ceres urban farm in Brunswick near the Melbourne CBD has seen demand for their produce triple since the pandemic started.(ABC Regional: Jess Davis)
Farms like this are a rare sight in Australian cities, with space a major constraint.
Calls to take existing green spaces, such as public parks and golf courses, and adapt them to support things like agriculture are growing in urban centres.
Nick Verginis recently started a social media group called ‘Community to Unlock Northcote Golf Course’ in a bid to get his local fairway converted into a public park with possible room for agriculture too.
The golf club is across the river from Ceres.
“In lockdown people have been really hungry to get in touch with nature, using whatever space they have on their balconies or in their small gardens to grow their own produce,” he said.
“This [fairway] obviously would be a natural place to expand that [farm], so some local residents could have access to a plot of land.”
Nick Verginis, with his son Teddy, started the Facebook group Community to Unlock Northcote Golf Course in the hope it could be used as a public space and potentially as a farm.(ABC Regional: Jess Davis)
Farming on the fringe
Converting sections of green spaces into farmland to create a local food bowl is already a reality in Western Sydney Parklands in New South Wales.
Thou Chheav learnt to farm 24 years ago after she moved from Cambodia. She now runs the family’s Sun Fresh Farms with her daughter, Meng Sun.(ABC Regional: Ben Deacon)
Five per cent of the 264-hectare park has been set aside for urban agriculture and 16 farms are already operating on it, selling at the farmgate or across Sydney.
Western Sydney Parklands is one of the largest urban parks in Australia — almost the same size as Sydney Harbour — and is one of the biggest urban farming projects in the country.
Sun Fresh Farms, run by Meng Sun and her mother Thou Chheav, has been leasing land off the Parkland for nine years to grow cucumbers, strawberries, zucchini, cherry tomatoes, and broad beans.
Ms Sun said, even before the pandemic, the popularity of sourcing food from peri-urban farms like her family’s was taking off.
“All the locals come out on the weekends. It’s providing food for the local community and also it gives them a better understanding of where food and vegetables come from,” she said.
Unlike produce sold at larger supermarkets that was often picked before it ripened, Ms Sun said being able to buy fresh vine-ripe produce appealed to customers.
“We like to pick fresh and sell direct to the customers. Cut the middleman out so there’s not much heavy lifting involved, it is just straight to the farm gate,” she said.
There are 16 urban farms operating in the Western Sydney Parklands, but there are plans to increase that number.(ABC Regional: Ben Deacon)
Suellen Fitzgerald, the chief executive of Greater Sydney Parklands, said they were currently accepting applications for new farming projects so that the precinct could expand its food production.
“Many of our farmers have roadside stalls and during the pandemic have reported an up-swing in customers, with the community choosing to shop locally over traditional supermarkets,” Ms Fitzgerald said.
Suring up food supply
Rachel Carey, a lecturer in food systems at the University of Melbourne, said cities should increase their urban farming capacity as an “insurance policy” in the event of future natural disasters or pandemics that disrupt supply chains.
“Obviously urban agriculture is a much smaller part of our food supply system, but I think it does have an important role in future,” Dr Carey said.
“If we can keep some of this food production locally it acts as a bit of a buffer or an insurance policy against those future shocks and stresses.”
Food systems lecturer Rachel Carey says urban farming has an important role to play in our future.(ABC Regional: Jess Davis)
Dr Carey said cities were more conducive to agriculture than most people realised.
Europe‘s largest urban farm opened in Paris during the COVID-19 pandemic.(Supplied: Nature Urbaine)
“Cities have access to really important waste streams, and also food waste that can be converted into compost and used back on farms,” she said.
“If we can keep some urban food production close by it enables us to develop what we call circular food economies, where we are taking those waste products and we’re reutilizing them back in food production to keep those important nutrients in the food supply.”
The other benefit was financial.
Dr Carey said buying food from local farmers helped to “keep that money circulating within our own economy rather than going outside to other areas”.
She believed Australian towns and cities should also consider the United Kingdom’s food allotment system, where local governments or town councils rented small parcels of land to individuals for them to grow their own crops on.
Major European cities such as Paris have also embraced urban farming amid the pandemic — the largest rooftop farm in Europe opened there in July.
The farm, which spans 4,000 square metres atop the Paris Exhibition Centre, supports a commercial operation as well as leases out small plots to locals who want to grow their own food.
There are plans to increase it to 14,000 square metres, almost the size of two football fields, and house 20 market gardeners.
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a surge in people growing their own crops, making their own bread, and even cooking more at home.(ABC Regional: Marty McCarthy)
From converting sections of golf courses or public parks into small farms, or median strips, car parks or rooftops, Dr Carey said the pandemic had shown the time was ripe to reconsider our urban food production methods.
“I see COVID-19 is a transformational moment that is going to lead to some rethinking about the way that we use our spaces in urban areas and in the city,” she said.
“So cities around the world are starting to look more to urban agriculture not just in terms of city soil-based farms, but also non-soil-based farms such as vertical farms and intensive glasshouse farming.”
City golf courses are being identified as potential sites for small urban farming plots.(ABC Regional: Jess Davis)
Brazil is home to the world’s largest Catholic population, but the rise of Pentecostalism is drawing young Brazilians away from traditional pews, and toward charismatic, “club-like” mega-churches.
And according to Cristina Rocha, a Brazilian-born cultural anthropologist at Western Sydney University, Australia plays an important role in this trend.
Over the past two decades, Professor Rocha has been researching the intersections between migration and religion, exploring why so many Brazilians travel to Australia.
“More and more international students coming from Brazil have said, ‘I came here because of Hillsong,'” she says.
But Hillsong Church, which was established by husband and wife pastors Brian and Bobbie Houston in Sydney in 1983, isn’t the only drawcard.
Professor Rocha discovered that C3, Australia’s second-largest Pentecostal church, has also amassed a large Brazilian cohort.
“[Both churches] focus on youth culture,” she explains.
“[Followers] can be who they are, they can have tattoos and piercings, they can dance and listen to secular music. They can drink in moderation.”
These attitudes, Professor Rocha says, are at odds with traditional Pentecostal churches back in Brazil.
Cristina Rocha is director of Western Sydney University’s religion and society research cluster.(Supplied: Cristina Rocha)
“What Hillsong and C3 say is, ‘Once you’re here, the Holy Spirit will change your life. It’s not us — we’re just humans like you.'”
Professor Rocha says many Brazilians — both students and pastors — who study at the churches’ colleges or attend their conferences, are spreading this style of worship.
“There is a circulation of Brazilians coming here then going back [to Brazil],” she says.
“They bring these practices — the way Hillsong does church with lights in a dark room, and the clubbing experience — and the very informal way of relating the Bible to everyday events.”
C3 now has two branches in Brazil, while Hillsong has one in São Paulo, and Professor Rocha says several of the pastors received their training in Australia.
Marist priest Paul Mahony spent nearly 20 years working with Catholic communities in Brazil.(Supplied: Paul Mahony)
Following in Catholic footsteps
Decades before C3 and Hillsong set up their outposts in Brazil, Australians from other denominations were spreading the Word in South America.
One of these Australians was Father Paul Mahony, a Marist priest who arrived the capital Brasilia in 1985 and spent 18 years working in congregations throughout the country.
“We went to live and work with the poorest people we could find,” he recalls.
Although Brazil was — and still is — a majority Catholic country, Father Mahony says the priesthood requires a high school certificate, so many locals were not qualified to lead their own parishes.
He recalls being faced with a surprising level of violence. During his time in Brazil, homicide rates were some of the highest in the world.
As a Marist, Father Mahony conducts services, including this one in a Brazilian jail, in the spirit of Mary, mother of Jesus.(Supplied: Paul Mahony)
“[In São Paulo] we had the largest cemetery in South America near our parish,” he says.
“In the time I was there, there’d be no child finishing primary school who didn’t personally know somebody who’d been murdered.”
When the spiritual becomes political
For Brazilian-born Gabriela Cabral da Rocha Weiss, who is now studying social work in Australia, this prevalence of violence explains why so many Brazilians look to a higher power.
“Sometimes the only hope people have is religion, because there’s poverty, violence and inequality,” she says.
Ms Cabral da Rocha Weiss, however, is neither Catholic nor Pentecostal. She was raised in the minority religion known as Spiritism.
Gabriela Cabral da Rocha Weiss was raised in a devout Spiritist family, but today she’s not religiously affiliated.(Supplied: Gabriela Cabral da Rocha Weiss)
It was founded in 19th century by a French educator, who wrote under the pen name Allan Kardec, and gained a following in Brazil. According to the country’s 2010 Census, there were 3.8 million members.
“Spiritists believe in God and Jesus Christ,” she says.
“They believe that we incarnate multiple times to develop our moral[ity] and our intellect, and whatever you did in past incarnations will impact your future.”
Although Ms Cabral da Rocha Weiss no longer practises today, she appreciates the moral framework and comfort that religion offers many in Brazil.
Ms Cabral da Rocha Weiss recalls attending Spiritism gatherings with her family, pictured, from an early age.(Supplied: Gabriela Cabral da Rocha Weiss)
But she says faith has become increasingly politicised, especially by the country’s right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro, who identifies as a Catholic, but has strong support from Evangelical and Pentecostal voters.
“I believe that religion mixed with politics — in a country where there’s no good education, everything’s so expensive, salaries are so low — can be a very dangerous mix, and it can be taken advantage of, like Bolsonaro is doing.”
Ever-evolving faith
While President Bolsonaro is popular amongst many religious voters, Professor Rocha says his leadership is dividing Christians, often within denominations.
“There has been a rift within all these major religions between the far-right conservative wings of these religions versus the progressives,” she says.
“We have seen the more conservative Opus Dei Catholics [working] with the very conservative Pentecostals, as much as we have seen progressive Pentecostals working together with progressive Catholics and Spiritists.”
Professor Rocha acknowledges that while Brazil’s religious demography has changed under the leadership of Bolsonaro, the transformation of faith is endemic to this country.
When the Portuguese colonisers arrived in Brazil in 1500, they brought Catholicism. Simultaneously, through the slave trade, religious practices from Africa also came to Brazil.
According to Professor Rocha, these religious traditions melded with the pre-existing spiritual practices of Indigenous Brazilians.
“Catholicism in Brazil is divided, even today, between Roman Catholicism — the hierarchical Church — and popular Catholicism, with the cult of the saints, the myriad miracles, healings and pilgrimages,” she says.
“This popular Catholicism is mixed with Indigenous religion, Shamanism, animism and African practices of veneration of ancestors, spirit incorporation, divination.
Stockholm: Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg has denounced the new farm bill adopted by the European Parliament as one that “fuels ecological destruction.”
Environmentalists say only 20 percent of planned spending under the massive farm subsidy bill passed Friday will go to climate-friendly policies.
“Eleven months after the European Parliament declared a climate emergency, the very same parliament voted to go ahead with an agricultural policy that – in summary – fuels ecological destruction with almost 400 billion euros,” Thunberg wrote in a Facebook post signed with four other activists.
In the budget proposal for 2021 to 2027 under discussion, 387 billion euros ($460 billion) is earmarked for agriculture, accounting for roughly one-third of all bloc spending for member states.
“Are we disappointed? No,” Thunberg and fellow activists wrote.
“Because that would mean we were expecting a miracle. Yet this day has once again shown the size of the gap that lies between current policies and where we would need to be, in order to be in line with the Paris Agreement,” they said.
The 2015 Paris agreement signed by the vast majority of world’s nations set out a path to reducing emissions and prevent out-of-control climate change.
Critics say 80 percent of aid is distributed to 20 percent of the most favoured beneficiaries under the farm bill.
The subsidies are prized by farming states, most notably France, Ireland and eastern European nations, where farmers enjoy strong political influence.
